Copper Crucible, by Jonathan Rosenblum:

...Only independent and more democratic unions can force corporations and Wall Street investors to look beyond short-term profits to long-term programs of worker training and empowerment...

...Some union leaders and many rank-and-file members indicate that they would prefer future technological advances be used to shorten hours and share existing work rather than continually expand production...

...CELIA WREN is a free-lance writer...

...Unions often excluded women and minorities from their leadership and even their best apprenticeship programs...

...These foreign firms had to share more power and profits with their workers, but also gradually became significantly more efficient and innovative...

...Large industrial unions had been early supporters of a form of economic internationalism which encouraged foreign corporate investment and discouraged collaboration with foreign unions to raise wages for all...

...Perhaps we would have to put up with a little more inequality, but a rising tide lifts all boats...

...In fact, growth over this period was substantially slower than during the preceding "liberal" era...

...It is therefore not surprising that efforts by the United Steel Workers, which represented Phelps Dodge workers, to rally national support for its strikers would come up short...

...John Buell When the Reagan "revolution" began fifteen years ago, its academic apologists assured us that "unleashing the private sector" would lead to greater wealth for all...

...The short-term monetary gains union leadership won for workers often came at the expense of the increased frustration of its membership about worklife concerns and declining levels of sympathy from service-sector and small-business workers who have been increasingly squeezed in the last two decades...

...Here at home unions must become more of a force for social justice and quality-of-life issues which have become increasingly salient...

...Under Phelps Dodge control, workers are now required to work twenty-six straight days before receiving two days off, and worker safety has deteriorated markedly...

...Jonathan Rosenblum's Copper Crucible, the story of Phelps Dodge's successful attempt in 1983 to bust its union, is a powerful case study of what Reagan-omics meant in one Arizona mining community...

...Workers were to be relatively highly paid cogs in industrial machines...

...Within workplaces, these unions often helped management resist "wildcat" strikes for more worker autonomy...

...In effect, it gave labor the right to share in the productivity gains of modern technology as well as seniority and job classification systems which protected workers against arbitrary dismissal...

...During sixteen years of union representation, these mostly Mexican-American workers had been able to negotiate wages equal to those of most factory workers...

...JOHN T. McGREEVY teaches history at Harvard...

...At the center of that politics must be a new form of labor internationalism which will seek alliances with unions abroad and fight for minimum-wage and labor-organizing clauses in trade agreements, just as corporate America works for "intellectual property" standards in these agreements...

...None of these goals would be beyond our reach in the next two decades...

...His books include Garcia Marquez: The Man and His Work, and a satirical novel, The Carlos Chadwick Mystery...

...Rosen-blum's fine study of the role of a union in the life of one community makes clear why a revitalized union movement must be part of any democratic reconstruction of this society...

...Popular ambivalence or even resistance to unions has allowed corporate leadership to roll back an implicit accord which had governed much of labor relations in major industries since World War II...

...She lives in New York...

...and it left an increasingly educated workforce frustrated by its relegation to an essentially rote status...

...The postwar accord left workers vulnerable to efforts to stretch the hours and the pace of work...

...When that was not accepted, the company quickly hired permanent replacement workers...

...JOHN BUELL writes on labor and environmental topics...

...Management gained the unquestioned right to make major decisions on when and where to invest in new technology and product choices as well as the right to control the pace and design of the work process...

...Sagging wages may be good for short-term profits, but ultimately the decline of wages worldwide will undermine demand and force unemployment higher everywhere...

...It is often argued that such changes are needed to meet "foreign competition," but corporate leadership has lobbied hard to keep adequate labor standards out of international trade agreements...

...Just as important in fostering these workplace changes, however, has been the larger public attitudes toward unions and replacement workers, a theme about which Rosenblum might have said more...

...nerable to informal employee resistance to the dictates of work and to competition from emerging low-wage havens and from advanced foreign competitors who had developed more progressive means of involving workers in product-planning and development strategies...

...Following a slump in international copper prices, Phelps Dodge demanded a rollback of wages...

...The government's own recent studies of labor-management relations show that most workers feel their best talents are wasted in their workplaces...

...Eventually the union was decertified, and in the process many long-term bonds within the community were shattered amid much violence...

...Conservatives were in power, but that ascendancy owed something to the evolution of the union movement itself...

...He is author of Democracy by Other Means: The Politics of Work, Leisure, and Environment, which will be published by the University of Illinois Press in July...

...Even more significantly, quality of life, measured in terms of security, opportunities for personal and professional growth in one's work, and time for family and other leisure pursuits have declined even more markedly for many...

...Just as important, workers want much more out of their jobs than a good paycheck...

...Most significantly, liberal governor Bruce Babbitt deployed state troopers to protect the replacement workers...

...This successful use of strikebreakers, aided by a series of National Labor Relations Board decisions, has helped to rewrite the labor-management relations of the last decade...

...At least as important was the dignity gained through such basic amenities as a lunchroom so that they would not have to eat sandwiches coated with the soot from the mill...

...Much of the post-World War II consensus inadvertently laid the groundwork for such tragedies as Phelps Dodge...

...But if unions must bear some blame for these events, life without unions in any form offers us a bleak future...

...JOHN FEFFER is the author of Shock Waves: Eastern Europe after the Revolution (South End...

...Unions and the rest of us are not powerless to fight such trends, but it will require a broader labor politics...

...Jeremy Rifkin's recent The End of Work (Tarcher/Putnam) clearly documents the enormous social and environmental costs in continual expansions of GNP and efforts to stretch the hours of industrial workers to create that "wealth...

...At home, unions became increasingly focused on good wages for their core workers rather than devoting some of their time to broader campaigns to organize the unorganized and to work politically for adequate wage standards and jobs for all...

...That accord, elaborated in Barry and Irving Bluestone's Negotiating the Future, was most fully achieved in the auto and steel industries...

...Management, for its part, was vulGENE H. BELL-VILLADA teaches Spanish at Williams College...

...With that came a chance for modest homes...

...Finally, a union movement more interested in organizing unorganized workers-especially the growing cadre of part-time workers-and in pushing for new community job-creation programs through both local governments and the voluntary sector, as Rifkin advocates, would gain a larger voice in our politics...